You shouldn’t have to defend your existence let alone what computing you do, this blog and its author is doing more for modern computing than anything else I’ve read this year. Keep it up, stay hopeful that things eventually improve.
This is just two people misunderstanding and talking past eachother.
The blogger wants to outsource living his life to other people, the commenter is getting hung up on pedantry too much to communicate what he actually wants to.
Mm, no, the commenter is not "talking past" the blogger. The commenter is very clearly rude. There is no need for that attitude.
You're confused if that's what you think about the blogger. I know this guy and he's the most DIY person to almost a farcical degree. You try booting into a distro without your monitor attached and then contribute a patch, still without your monitor attached, see how you do.
I couldn't read this in full. Too frustrating.
I feel like we should be able to strive for things to be better while also appreciating what has been done so far.
Linux is just a base that people stack other software on top of. Audio crash? Pulse or Pipe wire?
Then the dozens of desktop environments, each doing things differently, split between X11 and Wayland.
I feel like blind devs should get together and make a distro that, out of the box, has as many accessibility features as possible, because it seems a lost cause to wait for some other distro to pick the right combination of tools.
How about devs that are using speech recognition because their hands or arms don't work or are not even present?
Also, telling someone to use a dedicated distribution because of the disability is telling them they're not worthy enough to use any distribution that suits their needs beyond accessibility issues.
I'm fortunate to have enough hand function to use a mouse to point and click on big UI elements, but for writing, I use Aqua.
I highly recommend that if you want to understand what it's like to live with speech recognition, or even be mildly disabled, you rent Aqua for a couple of months. It's affordable. No need for a dedicated microphone; it works with the built-in microphones on your laptop, provided you have a relatively quiet room.
Once you've started using Aqua to get comfortable with how Aqua works, place a book on your keyboard to block easy access. Every time you touch the book to use the keyboard, send $10 to an accessibility developer. Alternatively, you could send the money to Aqua to encourage them to develop a Linux version of the desktop client.
Segregation is not equality
Not what I said either. That's like saying we're segregating the Linux Mint from the Ubuntu users.
It's not your intention, but it is functionally what you suggested.
First, we've had these distros, about 5 of them. They're very hard to maintain and are all abandoned now. SOme of these were long-running projects but scale matters in these enterprises.
Second, you can't always use some custom distro. I work for a security company. For various reasons, it makes sense to use a small set of distros that have some major maintenance / royal road element.If I try running Slackware or some distro only maintained by one guy on my work machine, as a practical matter I'm putting my career in jeopardy when I can't do something basic and I ahve no explanation.
The reality is, this shit needs to get fixed. It's not a problem that's going to go away, blind folks aren't going to go away, though that would be really convenient for many, I guess. Let's just clean up this mess. Blind folks are trying to contribute and help, there have been some major breakthroughs lately, mostly because folks have somewhat less crappy attitudes and it's just gotten too ridiculous, but the attitude of "oh just go do this" has run its course, as has the RTFM and figure it out when you can't even get intital purchase on the system. Let's just grow up and clean up this mess, own it and get on board, no on'es asking you to fix this but at least don't be a pain from the sidelines and just say hey, this needs to happen, I support it.
This argument ports really well onto a lot of other things tech demographics touch if you just change the subject specific nouns.
Like: "The linux kernel should embrace future demographics."
And the GNU/linuxers respond: "Then go FOSS yourself and fork it."
Like what demographics? People who want to take the kernel, fork it and close it? Perople making low quality patch bombs behind closed doors?
It already is allowing Rust...
As far as the commenter, the GNU bit is still relevant. But you should normally call the distribution its name.
SteamOS is not quite as much GNU as Debian.
> Like what demographics
The demographics of programming languages choosen/picked up by new generations of foss developers.
With GNU/linuxer i meant the stereotypical stubborn people resisting change not a specific distro.
I guess there will be non-technical frictions between rust and C in the linux project for as long as the GNU/linuxers exist. And like the OP, it can be seen as a matter of accessibility.
Just because we don't want to use your crap and tolerate your condescension doesn't mean we're stubborn. It may very well be that you're asocial/antisocial and your software is low quality.
So many quotable parts in the post, a must read for anyone, not just those working on software.
Internalizing the plight of someone with different needs and life circumstances (and this is not just about different abilities, such as sight) is how you actually support, work on, and provide more freedom to others. Took me a while to check my own privilege, but I believe I'm a better person for it.
I believe it's actually called GNU/Burn
[deleted]
The truth is, big tech corporations could probably skimp on accessibility as well, but they want their government contracts very much, and software used in governments, as far as at least the proverbial first world is concerned, has an accessibility bar it must meet. And it just so happens that these corporations have large chunks of money to invest in that.
If requirements for being in such lucrative markets loosen up, I'm willing to bet accessibility in Apple/Microsoft offerings will get defunded and rot away.
Of course you can question Red Hat and Canonical for not doing enough in the space, but truth be told, the grassroot open source efforts to make everything in open source more accessible amount to afterthoughts at best. How many GUI toolkit have appeared recently? How many of them are accessible? How many terminal applications gain TrueColor support and draw fancy stuff in the terminal? How many of them are of any use to someone who can't see your efforts in repurposing Unicode symbols to draw pictures in the console?
Nah. Apple’s commitment to pervasive accessibility features has been around for so long and has had so much investment into it it is clear it is in their DNA.
It’s probably the nicest thing about the company, and it stands out even more in the last ten or twenty years as the company becomes more and more scummy and despicable. It’s deep down and was established back when it was run by humans with deep empathy.
Yeah, right. Do not confuse accessibility with simplicity.
So much accessibility that:
You need to use gestures to access critical functions.
Half of screen readers cannot be connected to their hardware.
You cannot easily get someone to write a driver for exotic input hardware.
There's no zoom feature in the OS.
Recently many UIs just break with big scale factors.
Keyboard support is lacking altogether in some bits of the UI.
Information is hidden and alpears at random.
Not to say Windows or Linux is free of it or better. The platforms are bad in different ways.
I get the Apple suspicion, but there's great Zoom functionality on every Apple device I've used. Also color invert, screen reader, and a whole rack of other a11y features. I agree that it's the nicest thing about the company.
> There's no zoom feature in the OS.
macOS absolutely has a zoom feature. I use it regularly, it's bound to ctrl + mouse scroll for me.
You shouldn’t have to defend your existence let alone what computing you do, this blog and its author is doing more for modern computing than anything else I’ve read this year. Keep it up, stay hopeful that things eventually improve.
This is just two people misunderstanding and talking past eachother.
The blogger wants to outsource living his life to other people, the commenter is getting hung up on pedantry too much to communicate what he actually wants to.
Mm, no, the commenter is not "talking past" the blogger. The commenter is very clearly rude. There is no need for that attitude.
You're confused if that's what you think about the blogger. I know this guy and he's the most DIY person to almost a farcical degree. You try booting into a distro without your monitor attached and then contribute a patch, still without your monitor attached, see how you do.
I couldn't read this in full. Too frustrating.
I feel like we should be able to strive for things to be better while also appreciating what has been done so far.
Linux is just a base that people stack other software on top of. Audio crash? Pulse or Pipe wire?
Then the dozens of desktop environments, each doing things differently, split between X11 and Wayland.
I feel like blind devs should get together and make a distro that, out of the box, has as many accessibility features as possible, because it seems a lost cause to wait for some other distro to pick the right combination of tools.
How about devs that are using speech recognition because their hands or arms don't work or are not even present?
Also, telling someone to use a dedicated distribution because of the disability is telling them they're not worthy enough to use any distribution that suits their needs beyond accessibility issues.
I'm fortunate to have enough hand function to use a mouse to point and click on big UI elements, but for writing, I use Aqua.
I highly recommend that if you want to understand what it's like to live with speech recognition, or even be mildly disabled, you rent Aqua for a couple of months. It's affordable. No need for a dedicated microphone; it works with the built-in microphones on your laptop, provided you have a relatively quiet room.
Once you've started using Aqua to get comfortable with how Aqua works, place a book on your keyboard to block easy access. Every time you touch the book to use the keyboard, send $10 to an accessibility developer. Alternatively, you could send the money to Aqua to encourage them to develop a Linux version of the desktop client.
Segregation is not equality
Not what I said either. That's like saying we're segregating the Linux Mint from the Ubuntu users.
It's not your intention, but it is functionally what you suggested.
First, we've had these distros, about 5 of them. They're very hard to maintain and are all abandoned now. SOme of these were long-running projects but scale matters in these enterprises.
Second, you can't always use some custom distro. I work for a security company. For various reasons, it makes sense to use a small set of distros that have some major maintenance / royal road element.If I try running Slackware or some distro only maintained by one guy on my work machine, as a practical matter I'm putting my career in jeopardy when I can't do something basic and I ahve no explanation.
The reality is, this shit needs to get fixed. It's not a problem that's going to go away, blind folks aren't going to go away, though that would be really convenient for many, I guess. Let's just clean up this mess. Blind folks are trying to contribute and help, there have been some major breakthroughs lately, mostly because folks have somewhat less crappy attitudes and it's just gotten too ridiculous, but the attitude of "oh just go do this" has run its course, as has the RTFM and figure it out when you can't even get intital purchase on the system. Let's just grow up and clean up this mess, own it and get on board, no on'es asking you to fix this but at least don't be a pain from the sidelines and just say hey, this needs to happen, I support it.
This argument ports really well onto a lot of other things tech demographics touch if you just change the subject specific nouns.
Like: "The linux kernel should embrace future demographics."
And the GNU/linuxers respond: "Then go FOSS yourself and fork it."
Like what demographics? People who want to take the kernel, fork it and close it? Perople making low quality patch bombs behind closed doors?
It already is allowing Rust...
As far as the commenter, the GNU bit is still relevant. But you should normally call the distribution its name. SteamOS is not quite as much GNU as Debian.
> Like what demographics
The demographics of programming languages choosen/picked up by new generations of foss developers.
With GNU/linuxer i meant the stereotypical stubborn people resisting change not a specific distro.
I guess there will be non-technical frictions between rust and C in the linux project for as long as the GNU/linuxers exist. And like the OP, it can be seen as a matter of accessibility.
Just because we don't want to use your crap and tolerate your condescension doesn't mean we're stubborn. It may very well be that you're asocial/antisocial and your software is low quality.
So many quotable parts in the post, a must read for anyone, not just those working on software.
Internalizing the plight of someone with different needs and life circumstances (and this is not just about different abilities, such as sight) is how you actually support, work on, and provide more freedom to others. Took me a while to check my own privilege, but I believe I'm a better person for it.
I believe it's actually called GNU/Burn
The truth is, big tech corporations could probably skimp on accessibility as well, but they want their government contracts very much, and software used in governments, as far as at least the proverbial first world is concerned, has an accessibility bar it must meet. And it just so happens that these corporations have large chunks of money to invest in that.
If requirements for being in such lucrative markets loosen up, I'm willing to bet accessibility in Apple/Microsoft offerings will get defunded and rot away.
Of course you can question Red Hat and Canonical for not doing enough in the space, but truth be told, the grassroot open source efforts to make everything in open source more accessible amount to afterthoughts at best. How many GUI toolkit have appeared recently? How many of them are accessible? How many terminal applications gain TrueColor support and draw fancy stuff in the terminal? How many of them are of any use to someone who can't see your efforts in repurposing Unicode symbols to draw pictures in the console?
Nah. Apple’s commitment to pervasive accessibility features has been around for so long and has had so much investment into it it is clear it is in their DNA.
It’s probably the nicest thing about the company, and it stands out even more in the last ten or twenty years as the company becomes more and more scummy and despicable. It’s deep down and was established back when it was run by humans with deep empathy.
Yeah, right. Do not confuse accessibility with simplicity.
So much accessibility that:
You need to use gestures to access critical functions.
Half of screen readers cannot be connected to their hardware.
You cannot easily get someone to write a driver for exotic input hardware.
There's no zoom feature in the OS.
Recently many UIs just break with big scale factors.
Keyboard support is lacking altogether in some bits of the UI.
Information is hidden and alpears at random.
Not to say Windows or Linux is free of it or better. The platforms are bad in different ways.
I get the Apple suspicion, but there's great Zoom functionality on every Apple device I've used. Also color invert, screen reader, and a whole rack of other a11y features. I agree that it's the nicest thing about the company.
> There's no zoom feature in the OS.
macOS absolutely has a zoom feature. I use it regularly, it's bound to ctrl + mouse scroll for me.
More: https://support.apple.com/en-il/guide/mac-help/mchl779716b8/...
[flagged]